For my Posterity

A Mother’s Prayer

On the burdens our families carry, the love that makes me cook the way I do, and learning to trade fear for trust.

Both my husband’s family and my own carry heavy things — the kind that get whispered about at family gatherings, or never spoken of at all. Between our two families, the inheritance our children were born into includes dementia, depression and bipolar illness, addiction, anxiety, diabetes, breast cancer, celiac disease, and Down syndrome.

I don’t write that list to frighten anyone, and I don’t write it as a battle plan. I write it because it’s the honest weight a mother carries in her heart — the burdens I bring to God on my knees, the faces I love, the reason I hold my children a little closer at night.

• • •

Why I cook the way I do

Years ago I read Dr. Weston Price’s Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, and it changed me. He documented communities all over the world who still ate their traditional foods — unaltered, unprocessed, close to the earth — and the striking dental health and strong, sturdy development he found among them. He also watched that health decline as refined sugar and white flour replaced the old ways.

That book gave me a conviction I’ve never let go of: that caring for my family’s bodies with real, whole food is one of the ways I get to love them. When I ferment the carrots, when I seek out clean meat and good milk, when I fill our plates with living food — that is love with my hands. It is my faithful part, and I offer it gladly.

• • •

The part I cannot control

But here is what I’ve had to learn, and it took me years. I cannot guarantee my children’s health.

For a long time I believed, somewhere deep down, that if I just ate perfectly enough I could build a wall around my children that no illness could ever cross — and that if any of those family burdens ever reached them, it would mean I had failed. That isn’t true. And laying it down has been one of the most freeing things God has ever taught me.

So much of what I feared was never in my hands, or in any food at all. Down syndrome begins at the very first moment of a life, in the way the chromosomes come together — it comes by no one’s fault, and by nothing a parent did or didn’t do. The illnesses of the mind — the depression, the bipolar, the schizophrenia — are woven far deeper than the dinner plate; they are not fed into a child or starved out of one. I can nourish my children with everything I have, and I will — but I cannot promise them a life without hardship. No mother can.

And I’ve come to believe that admitting this is not a defeat. It is exactly where trust begins.

• • •

What I truly want for my children

When I strip the fear away, what my heart actually longs for is different than it used to be.

I want my children to know, all the way to their bones, that they are beloved of God and of infinite worth — exactly as they are, healthy or sick, strong or struggling, however their bodies and minds are made.

 Every one of them is, as the Psalmist says, fearfully and wonderfully made.

I want to give them every good thing I can — nourishing food, a peaceful home, my time, my prayers — as gifts of love, not as insurance policies against a frightening world. I want them to know God, to carry courage for whatever comes, and to meet both health and hardship with faith.

And this I want most of all: I want them to understand that a person’s worth was never in their teeth, their health, or their abilities. I have people I love dearly in my own family who live with some of the very things on that list — including a precious soul with Down syndrome — and I need you to hear me: they are not tragedies to be prevented. They are treasures. They are some of the clearest windows into the love of God I have ever been given.

• • •

What I saw in Chile

On my mission in Chile, I ached over the suffering I saw — the tooth decay, the illness, the hardship of people who had gone without care I had always taken for granted. For a long time I wrestled with why God would allow such suffering.

I don’t have a tidy answer anymore, and I’ve stopped pretending to. What I do believe is that God’s heart breaks over suffering even more than mine does; that He is near to the hurting; and that my job is not to decide who is to blame, but to love, to help, and to do what good I can with what I’ve been given.

• • •

The gift of celiac

I’ll end with a gratitude that surprises people: I am thankful for my celiac disease. My own body simply will not tolerate the fillers and the shortcuts — it flags them for me. They say a salmon can detect a single spoonful of the water it was born in, poured out into ten Olympic pools. My body is a little like that with gluten. Even a trace — from a dusted conveyor belt, a contaminated warehouse, the glue on a package — and I know. It has kept me honest, and close to real food, for years.

But hear me on this...eating gluten-free is NOT the same as eating healthy. Going gluten-free is a beginning, not an arrival. There’s a Japanese proverb I love — “When you have completed 95 percent of your journey, you are only halfway there.” True nourishment asks more of us than simply removing one thing.

• • •

So this is my prayer, in the end: to love my children well, to feed them faithfully, to give them my very best — and then to open my hands and entrust them to a God who loves them even more than I do. Not out of fear. Out of love.

“There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear…” - 1 John 4:18

With love,

Steffanie

If you’re a parent reading this while your family walks through one of these illnesses: please know it is not your fault, and you are not alone. Conditions like Down syndrome, and illnesses of the mind and body, arise for reasons far beyond any diet — and no love is measured by a child’s health. Care for your family’s bodies as an act of love, lean on good doctors and good people, and be gentle with yourself.